My main beef with datalist is that there's no easy way to show and allow only text (e.g. Beverly Hills), but have the actual value selected be a number (e.g. 90210). In other words there's no analogy to <option value="90210">Beverly Hills</option>.
That and there's no HTML way to interactively load results. Or are you really going to serialize half a million records to HTML and transfer it all every time the relevant block is added to a page? What if it sits in the header or footer templates?
Indeed, and if I have to build a component for it in JS anyway, I'm highly likely to just reuse that component everywhere I need it rather than have to build, style, and test different implementations in the same app.
Right, I sort of expected there to be an attribute for an url.
<datalist json="search.php?q=toyota+corolla">
But then you would want to send other form values along with it which might make things more complicated than it should be?
Static could be better too. When search engines first started building these auto complete dropdowns the multi word input was really the killer feature. To have something like "green toyota" you would have to generate an element for all color and brand combinations? And the you want it to work for "green toyota corolla" and you get an abc kind of list length.
Perhaps a wildcard would have been fun or regex options.
> Each <option> element should have a value attribute... It can also have a label attribute, or, missing that, some text content, which may be displayed by the browser instead of value (Firefox), or in addition to value (Chrome and Safari)... The exact content of the drop-down menu depends on the browser, but when clicked, content entered into control field will always come from the value attribute
This seems... underspecified. Not ideal that Chrome/Safari aren't aligned with Firefox here, and that there is no standard way to only display the label
